Start R Markdown Pawel

Given the wide scope of the data, we initially visually explore the flood data to see if there are any immediate geographic trends noticeable in the data. To this end, we look at the combination of location of flood, flood cause, and flood magnitude:

This animation shows every day from the beginning of June to the end of October 2007. Floods appear on the map once they have “began” according to the flood data and disappear in a similar fashion. Geopotential height is indicated by the shading, which is red for lower levels and blue for higher levels. The animation suggests that lower levels of geopotential height tend to occur before or at the beginning of floods.

The animation also points out another difficulty in predicting the severity of floods - not only does the actual rainfall (or proxy for it such as geopotential height) matter, but geography also plays a role. Note that there are many floods along the northern portion of India and into Bangladesh, despite there not being extreme values of geopotential height during this time. This, however, is related to the fact that this is where the mighty Ganges river runs, and rivers such as this can drain very large areas. Thus flooding can potentially occur long after and far away from the heavy rains.